UCLA lost its last hopes for a postseason appearance with last week’s loss to Arizona State, but linebacker Tyree Thompson said the team still had an extra “pep in our step” at practice this week.

It must be ‘SC week.

The Bruins hope a win against their rivals can revive some hype around their losing season entering next week’s season finale against Stanford.

As always, I welcome your questions for this weekly feature. You can send them to me on Twitter at @thucnhi21 or via email (thnguyen@scng.com). Let’s get to the A’s to your Q’s.

Email question: “Fourth quarter, on the other side of the 50-yard line, fourth-and-5. Up to that point, ASU had only punted once in the second half (on its first possession) and I believe once in the first half and we punt? Any explanation why we didn’t go for it?”

To recap: UCLA had fourth-and-5 from the Arizona State 40-yard line with more than 12 minutes left. The Bruins were down 24-21 at the time and the Sun Devils had missed a field goal on their prior drive. Chip Kelly elected to punt, Stefan Flintoft’s kick dribbled into the end zone for a touchback and Arizona State then marched 80 yards in 15 plays in an eight-minute, five-second touchdown drive that pushed the lead to 10 again. The double-digit deficit proved to be too much for the Bruins to overcome.

When asked of the decision after the game, Kelly said this:

“Fourth-and-5? Yeah, I didn’t think we were going to get it. I mean, I think it was a three-point game at the time, so can you punt it and pin them down there. I don’t know anywhere where you would go for it on fourth and five on your 40-yard line with 12 minutes to go in the fourth quarter.”

I think he misspoke when he said “your” 40-yard line because UCLA was obviously at the ASU 40-yard line, but as a non-coach, non-fortune-teller, non-oddsmaker, I could understand the overall thinking.

Twelve minutes in a three-point game is a long time. You have a good punter who you believe can get the ball down inside the 5 to flip field position. That, unfortunately for the Bruins, didn’t happen. But you’re also not expecting an offense to put together an eight-minute drive. And if it can, then you just have to tip the cap. Arizona State did it, and you tip the cap.

It was a bit of a disjointed game with momentum see-sawing back and forth. At that time I don’t remember feeling like UCLA had great momentum even though ASU had just missed a field goal on the prior drive. A punt, while boring, made Arizona State really earn the momentum of the game back by forcing its offense to drive the ball down the field, which is, in general, harder to do than come up with one stop on fourth-and-5.

I know a lot of people look at Kelly as an aggressive play-caller on fourth down and conflate that idea with him wanting to have an aggressive team overall. He’s never really said that that’s an overarching mentality he wants to instill, although the Bruins so have 21 fourth-down attempts this season. That’s tied for the fourth-most in the Pac-12.

Eight of the fourth-down tries have been with 5 or more yards to go, but four of those were garbage-time tries and two were out-of-the-ordinary special teams plays (fake punt and botched field goal against Oregon). One, a fourth-and-6, was with just seconds left in the first half against Arizona with the Bruins ahead 17-7. It was kind of first-half garbage time when the teams just wanted to get into halftime. So in general, Kelly doesn’t go on fourth-and-5 or longer in meaningful situations.

The last example is interesting though: fourth-and-6 from the Arizona 39-yard line in the second quarter with UCLA up 10-7. This is almost exactly the situation in terms of down, distance and field position as the one Kelly passed on against Arizona State. It was also a three-point game, although the Bruins were leading against Arizona and trailing against ASU.

UCLA converted the try against Arizona. Wilton Speight completed an 11-yard pass to Caleb Wilson and the Bruins scored on the drive to go up by 10 entering halftime. That was a calculated risk that ended up working. Last Saturday, the Bruins took a calculated non-risk and got burned.

In the end, hindsight is always 20-20. It looks like a bad call because it didn’t work, but there’s never going to be a way to draw a definitive line between what would have been a fourth-down try in that moment to a win.

Perhaps you could argue that a try could have at the very least given UCLA a better chance, but, looking at the time and the score, it didn’t look like their chances at the time were exactly bad either. We could go ’round and ’round all day. This rabbit hole that I got myself into is probably why Kelly doesn’t like hypothetical questions.

Facing the last two games of Chip Kelly’s disastrous inaugural season, how do you feel about the future of UCLA football: trending up, trending down, treading water or something else?

I was asked a similar question last week. I think the same ideas still apply this week in that 1) it’s too early to really judge, and 2) UCLA has done some good things, like establishing a running game and developing its offensive linemen, that may bode well for the future.

If you want to look at the long-term health of the program, it’s way too early to make any legitimate claims about upward, downward or “no-ward” trends after less than a full season. This season will be one data point on an extensive plot of UCLA football history. You can’t make a trend out of one lonely point of data.

As you’re living it week by week, it makes you want to zoom in on every single twist and turn of what’s been a weird season. But if you’re trying to step back and project something to a larger view of the program, that one time UCLA collapsed on special teams against Oregon won’t mean as much, even if it made you confused beyond words when you were watching it unfold in the moment.

In general, I would think that the chances of UCLA getting better in the long run are higher than the chances of the Bruins getting worse. That’s not necessarily something I believe to be true because something the team did to convince me, though. It’s just that if you start at 2-8, there are a lot more possible outcomes in the direction of 12-0 in future seasons than the possibilities that lean toward 0-12. The odds are in UCLA’s favor in that way.

There have certainly been a lot of interesting developments, although I’m not sure if I can label them all “surprises.” With the limited amount of access during training camp, it was hard to come up with fair expectations to start with.

I’ve found Boss Tagaloa’s immediate impact at center very interesting. I was skeptical to start because of the difficulty associated with playing center, but as we’ve seen, he immediately solidified the offense and the running game when he jumped into the starting lineup after his suspension. Tagaloa hasn’t been perfect in the position, especially last week when there was some confusion with the snap count late in the game, but as a first-time center on an offensive line that was the biggest question mark entering the season, I feel like he’s done better than I expected.

Why do you suppose Darnay Holmes isn’t used on special teams or offense? Especially with the injuries to Allen and Phillips. He’s clearly a special talent/playmaker and a threat to score any time he has the ball in his hands.

Chip Kelly talked earlier this season about being mindful of how much the staff uses Darnay Holmes. Because he rarely comes off the field on defense, the coaching staff wants to try to find as many outside opportunities for him to rest as possible. He started the season at kick returner but then relinquished the job to Demetric Felton. At the time, Kelly cited wanting to “take a little bit of a load off” Holmes and Felton’s progression as reasons for the change.

However, Holmes was back at kickoff return this past week. He just didn’t get a chance to return any kicks because Kelly has also stated that he is in favor of players fair-catching kickoffs inside the 25-yard line for touchbacks under the new rule instead of running them out and trying to get to the 25-yard line on their own:

“If they’re going to change the rule and give it to us on the 25 every time, I don’t know why people don’t fair catch more often, to be honest with you,” Kelly said on Nov. 5.

In terms of his offensive prowess, I think the staff believes that they have enough depth at receiver to make it without going through the trouble of moving their best corner to offense at this point in the season. It’s unclear how much of the offense Holmes knows at this point, and while his work ethic and football IQ are unquestioned, there would likely be some study time involved in a potential switch, even if it’s just for a specialized package.

Could Holmes be a pretty good receiver? Absolutely. But he is also already a pretty good corner, and unfortunately there’s only one of him to go around. The staff wants to be smart with their use of him to make sure that he’s maximizing his talents while also taking care of his body to remain at a high level. That’s sometimes the curse of having such an exceptional athlete when even if he’s excelling in one area, it feels like you’re missing out on something else.

I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if UCLA won this weekend against USC. I don’t know if it’ll happen, but I could see it happening. USC, even with some of its injuries to key players, is still likely the more talented team overall, but the Trojans, like the Bruins, are young and inconsistent. When you get two inconstant teams against each other, you never know what could happen.

We saw what happened to Josh Rosen in his first rivalry game. He was the wunderkind freshman that season. And when he got in front of USC, he didn’t resemble the player he had been for most of that year. Although JT Daniels is talented as well, I wouldn’t be surprised to see him struggle in a rivalry situation, especially with an offense that doesn’t appear to have the type of supporting cast that Rosen did in his freshman year.

DM question: “Any status update on Marcus Moore? I know he was suspended indefinitely but is he still in school? Any other info?”

The only status update Chip Kelly provided on Marcus Moore when asked of him on Wednesday was that he remains suspended indefinitely and that he remains in school. I don’t have any other information besides the fact that I saw him riding a razor scooter near campus two weeks ago.

Oregon had some good pot roast with roasted vegetables this year. I was a fan. There were also cookies.

This year, Cal was sandwiches and hot dogs with salad. Arizona State was a morning game so it was breakfast buffet with scrambled eggs, sausage and home fries. I can’t remember what Oklahoma was because I think I went to breakfast before the game and was too full to eat again in the press box. There must have been some barbecue involved. But Colorado was easily the best.

UCLA went to BYU in 2016, and BYU, in as odd of a food/location pairing as you’ll ever come across, has Brazilian barbecue in its press box. That was memorable.

Outside of my UCLA days, the LA Galaxy specialize in press box tacos that I miss. When I was in college, Washington football played Illinois in Solider Field and they had deep dish pizza. CenturyLink Field always had an extremely impressive morning-game spread for Seahawks games that included a made-to-order omelette bar. It was amazing.

Thuc Nhi Nguyen has covered UCLA for the Southern California News Group since 2016. A proud Seattle native, she majored in journalism and mathematics at the University of Washington. She likes graphs, animated GIFs and superheroes.